This is a quietly excellent movie about mystery, racism, and love. Chris Cooper plays present-day Sheriff Sam Deeds, filling the boots of his late father, Sheriff Buddy Deeds. Much of the movie is told in flashback by director John Sayles, with the camera panning from a present day scene to the location of some event in the Fifties where we see it replayed, then panning back to the present characters, lost in recollection of those days gone by. It works very well, without having to have title cards telling us when we've moved in time.
The story takes place in a sleepy hick town in Texas on the Mexican border, near a US Army base. In this town, everyone has a past. Even the sheriffs. Sam has gone through a divorce, and we get to see him with his ex-wife, Bunny (Frances McDormand). It's a heart-tugging scene, as it becomes clear Bunny will never be the son her father wanted.
Sam moves back home to see his high school flame, Pilar (Elizabeth Pena). However, his father's friends press him to run for sheriff because the name Buddy Deeds still carries weight, and the current sheriff isn't popular. Sam wins, but it's no victory for him. Sheriff Buddy Deeds took over the job when Sheriff Charlie Wade (played with great menace by Kris Kristofferson), a corrupt, racist man, simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. Since Wade was hated by all the blacks and browns in town, it was a toss up who did him in, and sleeping dogs were let lie.
But "Sleep ... knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care," and Sam keeps getting clues across his sheriff's desk that he can't ignore. Clues about who murdered Wade; unfortunately, the clues point all over the place -- to the African American bar owner who ran numbers in the backroom, a Mexican who ran wetbacks across the Rio Grande in the back of his truck, and it takes some quiet patience to knit up the unraveled threads that go back about forty years.
Sam renews his acquaintance with Pilar, and we meet her mother and learn her mother's past. The African American bar owner has a past, too, and it's bound up with the current base commander (Joe Morton, currently in the TV series "Eureka"). As Sam patiently knits the clues into a fabric that tells the story, we find that everyone's past is intertwined. As Sam pulls it all together, he discovers much more than he bargained for. Much more.
Although there is violence in the movie, it takes a back seat to the development of character. We watch Sam shed his old skin, accept his divorce, and move on. Elizabeth Pena is very good, giving us novels with a brief pause in her walk when she sees Sam again. It's a movie for patient people, and the patience is rewarded with an ending that is moving.
John Sayles directed "The Brother from Another Planet," a completely off beat picture totally unlike "Lone Star" (and starring Joe Morton). And Chris Cooper played Colonel Frank Fitts, a character totally unlike Sam, in "American Beauty." And Frances McDormand - I haven't seen her in a film I didn't like: "Blood Simple," "Fargo," "Burn After Reading."